


Sad Songs Sung in a Different Room

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Inspector Rebus - Ian Rankin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-21
Updated: 2008-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:40:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1624778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clarke has already learned the things that will keep her going.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sad Songs Sung in a Different Room

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't read Exit Music yet, so this story is separate from that bit of canon; I tried my best to get the feel of Rankin's writing, though I kept this story away from plot and more toward introspection. I hope it didn't disappoint! And I'm sorry it's so short. I was writer's blocked for a freakishly long time.
> 
> Written for pene

 

 

**Sad songs sung in a different room**

The first Clarke heard of DI John Rebus was that she would be reporting to some bastard transfer from the station that had just burned down, Great London Road. As the newest DC at St. Leonard's, she'd drawn the short straw - something she hadn't completely understood at the outset, thinking surely no one could be as bad as what was floating around about Rebus. "Curmudgeon" was the kindest term; "drunkard" following swift after. `He's a bit into the slosh is all,' DS Holmes assured her. He'd also been transferred from the charred remains of the ignoble Great London Road police station. They hadn't got on at first, him prickly at her Englishness though grudgingly he'd granted, `You've a proper name, at least.'

Funny thing about that name - given by English lecturer parents, vaguely inappropriate, but nowhere near as much so as the tourist she'd run into night before last during one of her jaunts to a local pub. She was an American tourist in Edinburgh with a tilted nose to go with her tilted eyelashes, long enough to curl and make wide eyes wider. `I just finished college,' she had said, gamine grin. `My parents sent me on this trip as a graduation present.' Just the next day those same wide eyes had stared at Siobhan from Curt's working slab, shocked and without light. Poor lass had been raped and strangled and left for whatever crept through alleyways at night nowadays. `Siobhan Edwards,' Rebus read off her chart. He cut a sideways glance to Clarke. `Coincidence, that.' `See-oh-buh-han. She pronounced it differently,' Clarke said. She didn't know why her lips felt numb, but they did: almost too numb to form the words she spoke. `Her parents thought it looked pretty, they didn't know how it's supposed to sound. They say it like it looks.' She shrugged in response to Rebus' shrewd look. `We ran into each other last night, chatted a bit.'

`Right,' Rebus drawled slowly. He had the gift of making every syllable insinuate. He flicked his eyes from the dead Siobhan's early-twenties countenance to the living Siobhan's no-where-close-to-early-twenties countenance. Clarke rolled her eyes. She and Rebus had got on well for years now, from those first days where she was greener than grass and he only halfway in his descent into a life inebriated, through her promotion and his encroaching retirement. Still, Clarke wasn't about to tell him: `The reason why this young bit and I were at the same establishment was that it catered to a specific clientele, the sort of which you, and indeed, all men, are excluded.'

It wasn't so much that she thought Rebus would trouble her over it. Truth be told, Clarke wasn't entirely sure why she was hesitant to share the details, especially given their pertinence to this particular case - Siobhan Edwards brutalized, bruises necklaced about her neck in messy finger imprints like a string of oversized purple pearls. A pretty enough girl, though that had been more evident when she was grinning and glowing with life. Had Clarke taken her up on the offer of a hotel room, what then...? 

But no. That was no game to be playing. Another thing she had learned from Rebus, though perhaps he had not meant to be teaching it: the fine art of shedding "might have beens". Clarke had seen, was still seeing, the result of failing at this coping task. 

Rebus nodded briefly to Curt, the "let us know what more you find out" unspoken. One thing Rebus managed, that rare skill of talking without words, a language learnt only via observation. Clarke had made herself his student, his sometime partner, his - well. There had been chances and opportunities, there had been hints at possibilities, and none had come to pass, not fully. And so Clarke tarted up and went pubbing. 

`It looks an open and shut one,' Rebus said. `Eyewitnesses put the girl with Mickey Lox late last night. Once we can get time of death we'll be able to put more together.' Mickey Lox was a local tough who had done two stints already for assault and robbery. 

`Are we going to have to get the American Embassy involved?'

Rebus shrugged. `Situation like this, it would be hard not to. We'll put it off a bit, get some more leg work done first.'

"Leg work" consisted of re-tracing the steps Siobhan Edwards had taken the night before, from her hotel room to the alley where she had been found, with stops in between for the dance club and three pubs she'd visited. 

`Busy girl,' Rebus noted. Really this was a job just for one DS, maybe even a talented DC; no need to involve a DI in the matter. Rebus involved himself regardless. 

`She was lively,' Clarke agreed. They had crossed the dance club off of their list and were heading to the closest pub next: not the one Clarke had met her at, though Clarke had not a clue what she would do when they did hit that destination. She was hardly a regular, but still familiar. Rebus had raised his eyebrow when he spotted its name on his list. `First time I'll have made it into that place,' he'd said, and opened his mouth as if on the verge of making some sort of joke. Something of Clarke's expression must have warned him off, for he'd subsided. 

"An open and shut one" - Clarke looked at Rebus. Yes; he was. 

:::

The third pub yielded eyewitnesses enough to seal the case. At the end of the day, Rebus asked Clarke, `Where did you say you met Edwards at?' 

`I didn't say,' Clarke said. Then, `The second to last one.' To his credit he said nothing in reply but a considering grunt. 

They had enough to put Lox away. He'd been picked up by a DC hours earlier; Lox was too stupid to realize there were consequences to his actions. There were always consequences. Clarke had known that before she'd ever chosen the police life. Some were bearable and some unbearable, and you could only guess which way they would fall before the fact. You could only surmise your own strength until it was tested. 

Clarke was no Rebus to have walked through a past never discussed and live as if it no longer haunted him, though of course it did - every failed relationship spoke of a malingering. She had once been overwhelmingly aware of her youth; that awareness had faded. 

She may not have lived the weight of years that hung on Rebus' shoulders, but she was not brand new to this world, not without scars. This day was one more added.

But it wouldn't change her. Much as nothing changed Rebus - perhaps the greatest lesson he had ever taught her, the only justification she would ever need for what others had questioned as her following an Inspector who had alienated everyone else and lacked for a viable future: this thing he had taught her, the awareness that at the heart of her was a person who would not change. Nowhere she had been and nothing she had seen had the power to transmute her beyond what she could recognize. With this knowledge she had the will to go on, and survive. 

`Drink?' Rebus asked. 

Clarke shook her head and thumped the folders spread about her desk. `I'll spend some time with the Good Book tonight,' she said. They called the folders and files and dossiers the "Bible" of the investigation. Clarke had a prodigious memory, particularly for testimonials. `Seal up the cracks in this case, make sure nothing will get in the way of the law's fist meeting Mickey Lox's face.' 

Rebus gave her a look, then a nod. `You know where to find me when you're done,' he said. Offer explicit: get skunked on my tab. She might take him up on it. If any night were the night for it, it would be this one. 

:::

Clarke closed her eyes. Behind her closed lids were the opened eyes of Siobhan Edwards. There were consequences for everything you did, for everything you did not do. 

:::

John Rebus looked up when Siobhan Clarke slid into the seat next to him, the smoky air of the pub wreathing her shoulders and face. `Shiv,' he greeted, truncating her name to annoy. `What'll you have?'

`Soda water with lemon peel,' she said, and he groaned. 

`A proper drink, please.' Still, he signalled to the bartender.

Siobhan smiled. `All that's needed for a proper drink is company to share it with.' She took her drink, and raised it in toast. `You know,' she said, `the first I'd heard of you back at St. Leonard's was that you were a drunk.'

He barked out a laugh and gulped a swallow. `I haven't changed and never will.' It wasn't an apology, though it could have been.

She smiled, and said, `Thank god for that.'

 


End file.
